When diving intoa horror game, whether it be a title like Dead Space, Resident Evil, or Alan Wake 2, you typically want something with abundant enemy variety for more interesting and worthwhile gameplay. While much rarer to see, there are a few horror games out there that want you to face one primary threat, which makes the setting more intimate and ups the suspense.
Lots of these games will be framed as escape-style experiences, focusing on stealth and evasion. They also might not be the best that the horror genre has to offer, but if you’re looking for a change of pace from slaying hordes of different enemies to wanting to deal with only one, then the following games are for you.
Granny is a PC and mobile-only experience, and it’s free on the latter platform, which makes it worth trying out. As the title suggests, the main enemy in this game is, in fact, a creepy old grandmother who seems intent on killing you if you try to escape her home.
The game works like an escape simulator, where you will have to deal with different puzzles in order to escape from Granny, who will be lying in wait to catch you and beat you with her weapons. There are five days for your escape plan to succeed, and you can also get weapons of your own to try and fight back.
From Granny’s house to your shady neighbor’s house, the neighborhood is just full of surprises. In Hello Neighbor, you find yourself sneaking into your neighbor’s place to investigate the horrors he’s hiding in his basement, only to then have to outsmart and successfully outrun him in a daring escape trial.
Although more kid-friendly, this stealth horror game is basically Alien: Isolation with a scary neighbor named Theodore Peterson instead of a Xenomorph and with no additional human or android enemies to worry about. The AI learns your characters' actions precisely like the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation, so you know you’re in for a suspenseful time at your neighbor’s place.
The creepypasta-born phenomenon of Slender Man gamesstarted with Slender: The Eight Pages and continued into the sequel, Slender: The Arrival, in 2013. The main enemy of this game is rightfully the eponymous faceless entity dressed in a suit and tie, stalking your character in the woods like the Blair Witch.
Minus the camcorder and dog companion, it’s very similar to Bloober Team’s Blair Witch game.You’re armed with only a flashlightand explore the surrounding woods, coming across nightmarish locations while trying not to fall right into the clutches of the Slender Man. The game also received a massive update for its tenth anniversary in 2023, which brings you better visuals.
Silent Hill titles typically provide you withplenty of iconic enemy variety and bosses. That is until Hideo Kojima’s P.T. and canceled game rewrote the formula by introducing a single entity stalking you through a loop inside a creepy home in the dead of night. Ten years after P.T. comes Silent Hill: The Short Message, a new first-person entry in the series featuring only one monster.
Like the name states, The Short Message is indeed a short game, but it’s free and the firstmodern-gen PS5-exclusive Silent Hill titleto launch even before Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. The story is another complex psychological horror tale, now set in Germany, and follows Anita’s search for her friend Maya, where she encounters a haunting creature made of cherry blossoms in the process.
Monstrum is probably one of the most interesting single-player horror games that exist. There are three main enemies in the game, but they’re not present all at once. The unique gameplay in Monstrum is that you can have multiple playthroughs, with one of the three monsters posing a peril in each one.
It all takes place withina procedurally generated cargo shipthat changes its layout with every run, turning it into a more Roguelike experience, and there’s also permadeath implemented. Once again, your goal here is to outsmart whichever monster you’re facing and escape the ship.
5No One Lives Under The Lighthouse
What Robert Eggers' 2019 Movie Should’ve Been
No One Lives Under The Lighthouse launched in 2020, the year after Robert Eggers' visually stunning and brutal 2019 masterpiece, The Lighthouse, released in cinemas. It’s said to have been an inspiration, and the themes are definitely similar. However, one aspect that this game delivers is there actually being a giant creature in the end, despite the title having you believe ‘no one lives under the lighthouse.’
It’s a first-person game with an atmospheric isolated setting using PS1-era graphics, where you help maintain the lighthouse before realizing maybe you’re not alone there. The premise is that you’re a lighthouse keeper filling in for the previous one who disappeared, which comes with a shocking twist. We won’t spoil the monster by giving away its description,but it is wonderfully Lovecraftian in nature.
4Clock Tower (1996)
Beware Only The Scissorman Of Barrows Castle
The classic survival horror series Clock Tower introduced the Scissorman into gaming’s gallery of iconic horror villains. And it would be the 1996 entry, which is really a sequel to the original game, where this killer takes center stage. The story continues to follow protagonist Jennifer Simpson in Norway, who’s now been adopted by Helen Maxwell, and the two work together to take down Scissorman.
Throughout all the chapters, Scissorman is the main enemy you’ll need to evade, with the final one taking you to Barrows Castle. The game is designed in a point-and-click style, and there are multiple different endings between Jennifer’s and Helen’s scenarios.
Although Supermassive’s line of horror gamesaren’t your traditional horror game experiences, as they’re more cinematic, focus heavily on QTEs, and have branching stories with multiple endings, the enemies are still quite scary and memorable. The two games from the studio featuring one main enemy you’ll have to survive are The Casting of Frank Stone and The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me.
The Casting of Frank Stone is based on Dead by Daylight’s lore, so The Entity will be lingering about in the background awaiting sacrifices, but it’s really the titular killer that characters only deal with both in the past and present timelines. Meanwhile, The Devil in Me takes inspiration fromthe horrific true story of serial killer H.H. Holmes, where a documentary film crew is trapped inside a replica murder castle and must escape copycat Du’Met and his traps.
Speaking of Dead by Daylight, this game is itself a contender here. Although there are five players in each match, only one of them is a Killer, and the rest are Survivors who must successfully evade the enemyin an asymmetrical 4V1 multiplayer setting. And it’s even more fun because, instead of an AI, it’s an actual player hunting everyone in the game.
There are plenty of Killers to choose from in Dead by Daylight, and the same is true for Survivors, which even includes licensed characters from other games and even acclaimed actor Nicolas Cage in separate DLCs. So have fun working together, repairing generators, and passing skill checks to avoid getting captured!
On many levels, Amnesia: The Bunker is different and more innovative than past Amnesia games in the series. Where most of them like to throw multiple forms of enemies at you, The Bunker sees you only trapped with one giant creature inside a WW1 bunker. You also aren’t completely defenseless here, as you have weapons and grenades you’re able to use to stun the Beast.
It’s a completely open bunker, and the Beast can drop in at any moment, so it’s an incredibly intense and suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse that almost mimics the gameplay of Alien: Isolation. The story is also very compelling, following two brothers-in-arms, Henri Clément and Augustin Lambert,with some connections to past gamessprinkled in.
There are still rats in the bunker that are considered an enemy, and then a brief section with a blind soldier antagonist named Toussaint Beaufoy, who you have to sneak past, but the Beast is the primary antagonist you worry about for the duration of the game.
